Hey, I need some help with some networking things I'm doing
First of all let me say that I'm in a college dorm, and I have 1 internet port (for the purposes of this question a port is a jack in the wall, an ethernet hook up) allotted to my room. Also, I have one IP address given to me. However, I would like to be able to have multiple devices (an xbox 360) set up to the internet at once. I know this is easily done with a router, but I don't have a router and also a router defeats my plans to not use up my own bandwith (yes I'm an asshole).
I do have a switch though, which effectively just increases the number of ports I have access to. So I hooked up my xbox to this but, unfortunately, the building gateway or router or whatever refuses to lease me an IP address for the xbox. So I manually set the xbox's IP address, by extrapolating from my own IP address. This worked fine for a while until my internet was shut down for IP hopping.
I believe they caught me through my MAC address. My internet is now back, and I would like to resume my consequence free downloading and gaming. My question is how do I do this so I am not caught. What can a network administrator see about my connection? Are the logs they keep of IP Hostname and MAC address tied to a physical ethernet port? If I were to change my MAC address (on the xbox) to that of another computers MAC address on the network, would an administrator be able to tell that the machine apparently moved from one room to another, or only that this machine is signing on? How can I obtain information about other people who are on the network (specifically hostname and MAC and matching IP) so I can pretend to be them?
I thought this might be useful: I changed the MAC address and Hostname of my computer, and then tried to renew my IP. The building router refused to lease me an IP. However, I was able to manually put in the old IP I had and everything works fine.
